That Bird Has My Wings: The Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row

by Jarvis Jay Masters

In winning a new life, I was losing everything that connected me to my identity.

hang on the street corner,

The Greyhound took me straight to Long Beach,

it stopped on the corner of Pacific Coast Highway.

his horseplay say what his words couldn’t.

who only worked there to support not working at

Gro-o-o-o-o-vy”).

The question of whether it was right or wrong slipped out of my mind without a whisper.

held up a gun and pointed it at his head.

It was freezing cold in the dormitory. I got up to use the bathroom and saw from the clock on the wall that it was past midnight. The night counselor was sitting at his desk in the office. “Masters, did you raise your hand for permission to use the restroom?” he asked quietly. “Nope.” “Well, go back to your bunk, lie down, and then, like everyone else, raise your hand and get permission first.”

You get yourself some sleep, okay?”

I wasn’t bent on returning home.

I’d come to love fleeing—the sense of being

“Yeah, if you wanna mess with it, you’re welcome, homie.” “Nah, I’m cool,”

I had never felt this anxious, though, like I had to stay awake full-time in order to survive. This was not the simple hide-and-seek I knew.

“Why you doin’ this? Why you goin’ to treat me like this, brotha? This is me! Don’t do me like this—please, please!”

briefl,

customers got sick; neighborhood people lay curled up in alleys around the garbage bins looking close to dead.

They scratched

their arms to bleeding and urinated i...

My story was different. With no bills, no wife, no children, and no drug habits, I had to find something to do with the thousands of dollars I’d made in just a few weeks. I began giving it away,

I didn’t have a drug habit, but people were now relying on me for money.

had spun so far out of control that I was lucky finally to be caught.

kept a CB radio that enabled me to monitor the local patrols, tracking their communication in an effort to steer clear. While the CB radio kept me from being captured many times—sometimes only by seconds—the police were never far away.

After that, I didn’t have to think about what to do. A voice came through the police bullhorn, ordering me and my friends to open the front door and walk out slowly with our hands up high. Filing out of the building into the police cars’ blinding lights, we found

The police had my friends and me bend over the hoods and trunks of their cars while they tried to figure out which one was me.

But I was charged, convicted, and sent to San Quentin, where I remain today. For many years I stared out at what I thought was freedom through a mesh screen and a crack in an old broken window. I would not find myself—and inner freedom—for many more.

but that was the card I’d dealt myself.

I almost passed out from the stench of urine sitting in the toilet.

When I felt like I’d be okay even if I had to eat off the floor of my cell, I stopped scrubbing.

Then I rolled up wads of wet toilet paper and plugged all the cracks I could find to keep the roaches from coming back.

Almost overnight we became grateful to the academies where we had learned how to sleep on our backs stiff, as if lying in our coffins, to keep from being raped.

The prison system recognized each of us only as a number at a location, but we claimed new names

For every word I wrote, there were a billion more things in my heart that I wished I could express to her in person.

Susan, a private investigator working on my case, sent me books on how to meditate and how to deal with pain and suffering.

and not to run from the pain but to sit with it, confront it, accept it in

Since 1990, I have lived on death row, waiting for appeals to be filed and then waiting to hear the outcome of those appeals. Until 2007, I spent all of those years in solitary confinement—

“Life in Relation to Death,” by a Tibetan Buddhist lama, Chagdud Tulku Rinpoche. His teaching seemed right up my alley, and I wrote him a letter in care of the journal.

Life in Relation to Death.

She asked if I needed help. I always needed help—I still do—

integrate my meditation practice with life on death row.

I hung in there with my meditation practice, and practice has become my best companion.

In prison it is especially easy to get attached to the good stuff. Then when the bad stuff comes around, you suffer harder. I need to be able to accept it all with equanimity.

I stopped cussing out other prisoners and guards. I discovered that I could save a lot of energy by not becoming angry over small things like the food or the noise. I discovered that it takes a lot more energy to hate

“This dude cannot stay out here. No way! And, man, you know I love you like a brotha. But all that Buddhist shit you gettin’ ready to run on us is not workin’ this time, not today.”

Cause, man, just look at that dude. He’s over there fist-fightin’ the damn air, man, talkin’ to himself like he is killin’ somebody.”

watching the lion pack’s jaws slowly opening

We spent the rest of our yard time talking about his Vietnam experiences and working out together on the pull-up bars.

accounts. We can send a gift outside the prison to anyone we choose.

under my bunk, where I keep them so that I can use my steel slab bunk as a writing desk. Then I lay staring up at the ceiling.